Baroness Drake: My Lords, in the interests of efficiency, I will move Amendment 9 and speak to Amendment 10.
Amendment 9 adds to the pensions guidance function of the new body matters relating to the state pension. In moving it, I do not seek to interfere or intervene in  the role of the Government’s Pension Service. My focus is on the ability of the new body to give holistic guidance in helping members of the public. For many, the state pension will be the most important risk-free element of their income in retirement. Understanding how it and state benefits sit alongside their private savings will be important when considering their options and choices, and then making informed decisions—as will securing entitlements to state pensions, particularly for women where actively claiming credits for caring can be important. Pensions guidance gains from being informed by all of an individual’s benefits and savings. That view will be facilitated if a pensions dashboard is successfully implemented.
Amendment 10 has the effect of extending the pensions guidance function of the new body to provide a single, public good pensions dashboard as a trusted consumer hub. Responsibility for provision in later life is shifting towards the individual. People rely on state, workplace and personal pensions and other savings to varying degrees. There will be multiple channels for them to keep track of and understand. A pensions dashboard would be a digital interface, a viewing space, where an individual can see all the information on their state pension and their different pensions savings pots. They can access their viewing space with their own digital identity.
A pilot dashboard is being developed by 17 providers under the auspices of the Treasury. A successful dashboard could evolve over time to include information such as ISAs and income drawdown—a range of information about an individual’s finances, savings and investments. The fintech industry may develop the basic dashboard to include more tailored personal finance products.
The pensions dashboard can change the way people view their pensions and savings. Get it right and it can improve transparency, support access to pensions information, empower savers and bring pensions into the digital age. But first and foremost it has to be built with consumer protection and safeguards at the heart of design and delivery. That is the first priority. The dashboard will have benefits to the industry and will promote innovation—but that should be the supporting, not leading, consideration.
There will be two important pieces of IT kit within the dashboard. One is a finding function to search across all providers and schemes to identify the savings data to be pulled down on to the dashboard; the other draws down the data on to the dashboard. For individuals, a dashboard means that they can see all their pensions and savings in one place, making it easier to engage and transact. It can be complicated for people to understand how much they have saved for retirement and to plan in good time. Information barriers exist. Small pots end up stranded. People now change jobs far more frequently and could end up with 11 or more small pots over their lifetime—a worryingly growing problem—but taking steps to aggregate them can be difficult and complex for the individual. Providers can deal with consumers with knowledge of their own pension savings, which they can also access with the individual’s consent—a valuable tool in their own activities of selling products and services.
Behind this brief description of the dashboard is a huge governance challenge. For it to be successful, it needs near-universal coverage of millions of people and all the holders of their relevant data. Near-universal coverage raises the governance bar on protecting consumers from bad behaviour by providers, unregulated providers and scammers, when all their pensions and savings data can be identified and drawn down into one place, accessible through a digital identity. Those with a fiduciary duty, such as trustees, will not release their members’ data to the dashboard unless they have confidence in the governance addressing providers that are reluctant to put all relevant data on to the dashboard, such as for customers holding higher-charge legacy pension products.
My list is not exhaustive—so what are the key ingredients for a successful dashboard? There should be a single public service dashboard and the new financial guidance body could be allowed to be that dashboard provider. This is a natural starting point. Consumers need a safe place to view their savings and pensions, where they are not going to be aggressively marketed to and are safe from scams and from being lured into making poor decisions. Providing this safe space is a key purpose of my amendment. It could make pensions guidance more efficient and friendly. Individuals would have greater knowledge so it could improve the conversation, with less time spent on working out what people have—colloquially, sorting out the carrier bag—and more time spent on the quality guidance people need.
I am not saying that there should always be only one dashboard. In future, I can see the case for additional well-regulated dashboards. Some providers will want to provide access to a dashboard through their own website. This is a debate I am not pursuing today, but there is a real need to learn to crawl before we can walk and to walk before we can run. Starting with a public good dashboard will engender trust and confidence and put the savers first.
Research by the Money Advice Service for the pension finder dashboard Alpha project recommended that the dashboard could initially be available in one location. In the future, approved financial industry websites and apps could be able to host it. The research showed consumers’ clear preference for the single-destination model for the dashboard and an anticipation or implicit assumption that it would be run by the Government or a government-backed service. Respondents said that they would have a greater level of trust in such a service because of expectations that the Government would not use personal data for commercial gain.
At the heart of the debate on the dashboard is strong and robust governance—and consumer protection for potentially millions of people—around not only the provision of a dashboard but the infrastructure that supports it. There are important issues of identity verification, data matching, pension-finding consent and the need to be policed and overseen. That oversight function needs to be rooted in a public service body, which could be the new guidance body. The industry has done a good job in driving a dashboard forward, but it will soon need to move into a new phase where that is driven forward in a more independent and autonomous way. Industry providers will be partial in  their view of the dashboard, which is rational for them, but that would be underpinned by its contribution to their sales of products and services.
My view is not novel. Sweden and Australia both provide their population with access to a clean version of a public dashboard. I urge the Minister to seriously consider the merits of this amendment, which addresses a real and growing need for the Government to give a clear signal on the direction of travel for strong and robust governance in the provision of a dashboard and the infrastructure that supports it. I beg to move.